Eyes up livestreamers and video content creators, as there's a new release candidate out for OBS Studio with some huge new features.

There's quite a lot new and improved like a limiter audio filter, an expander audio filter, multi-track audio support with FFmpeg available in advanced output settings, a fourth mic/auxiliary audio option in audio settings, stereo balancing (panning) available in the advanced audio properties section, an option to automatically remux recordings to MP4 and loads more.

Multiple parts of the interface were also improved like a new optional stats dock, an option to change the OBS base/output resolution to the size of a source in the right-click context menu, a light rectangle will show up when hovering your mouse over a source in the preview to show it can be selected, a simplified and improved user experience for the "Stream" page and so on.

For Linux users, one particular highlight is finally seeing support for VAAPI for video encoding.

Additionally, for Windows there's NVENC and Encoding Improvements and Service Integration with different streaming services. In regards to the Service Integration, the OBS team did say "Linux support is planned and a priority" back in December. The latest on that, is they say they need to fix the "official obs-browser build with Linux" which is "something we plan on addressing soon".

pete910erm, It already had it, it's what I use for hardware encoding with AMD

I think it's been available as a standalone patch for a while. On Debian Sid I have not had access to VAAPI but I'm thrilled it's finally coming. Maybe your distro has been applying the patch on their OBS releases?

I'm more excited about the audio features (especially multitrack, whatever that means exactly, and a built in limiter). Due to the lack of any audio plug-in support we are pretty much limited to the built in effects unless you go to great length and try to get OBS to work nicely with external effects (JACK, PolypAudio).

I'm not too familiar with the VAAPI details. Is it not detrimental to the performance of the GPU for games? Is the encoding quality on par with CPU encoding?

The release notes don't mention any bug fixes, so it's hard to say what the feature vs. fix balance looks like. I'd rather have them fix their bugs and improve their codebase than add features. Try running OBS in Valgrind if you are up for a little shock.

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